Miscellaneous

This tattoo is from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Series. The images and quotes are from various books in the series. I chose these quotes, because of how beautiful I find Stephen King’s writing to be.

“The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home”

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

I’ve always been drawn to Sherman Alexie’s prose, and after reading “Jesus Christ’s Half-brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation” (from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), one line just resonated with me over and over. I love both the strength of women and music (the optical illusion is both a woman’s silhouette, and a musician playing a saxophone), but even more so, I love the words that flow around it. Being half white and half Navajo, I’ve always felt as though I was walking a fine line; in Arizona, I was too white to be Indian, and in Pennsylvania, I was too Indian to be white. I’ve existed in a liminal space for so long, that I often feel like an illusion myself, and see this tattoo as embracing the in betweens that make us individual, while I also acknowledge that privilege does exist, and half the time I am permitted that luxury.

Been sober so long it’s like a dream but I feel better somehow and Auntie was so proud of me she took James and me into the city for James’s checkup and James still wasn’t talking but Auntie and James and I ate a great lunch at Woolworth’s before we headed back to the reservation. I got to drive and Auntie’s uranium money Cadillac is a hell of a car and it was raining a little and hot so there were rainbows rainbows rain, bows and the pine trees looked like wise men with wet beards or at least I thought they did. That’s how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like the disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I’ll never tell you and I’ll never show you the same trick twice.I’m traveling heavy with illusions.

In my mother’s handwriting. My best friend Steph and I got blue leaves from the play “The House of Blue Leaves” by John Guare. We have loved that play since we were in it together back in high school.

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

It’s from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. When I first read it, this is the quote that stuck with me. Then one of my English teachers told me to go knock the universe off its axis and send it reeling. The combination of both of those ideas made me think that maybe I really could do something powerful. It made me think that I could possibly change the world and have an impact. I got it as a reminder to always be insane and creative and impulsive. The teapot is Russell’s teapot and is a testament to my Atheism. The teapot essentially disproves the idea of God because Russell said (paraphrased) that the it was just as likely that there was a teapot floating in space as it was that God existed. I’m also just really fascinated with the idea of the universe and space.